Hey folks,

The openni driver for the kinect has had some stability issues over
the last 6 months. This is now documented through a few threads on
answers.ros.org and a few bug tickets. I believe some people can still
run the driver successfully, whereas some cannot (including myself).
All my machines are setup similarly, and at this time I cannot get the
OpenNI to work on any of them.

I have spent a bit of time in the last couple of days throwing
together a libfreenect based substitute. The main goal while writing
this driver was to get the driver to have the same API as the openni
one, allowing transitioning between the 2 drivers with minimum
modifications. For this reason, I've used the current openni driver as
a base rather than the now deprecated kinect_camera stack. The driver
can be found here:
https://github.com/piyushk/freenect-ros-pkg
https://raw.github.com/piyushk/freenect-ros-pkg/master/rosinstall/freenect.rosinstall

The driver works but is quite rough (needs code cleanup and thread
safety), and a registration issue needs to be solved:
https://github.com/piyushk/freenect-ros-pkg/issues/

Is anybody interested in helping me test/maintain/develop this driver
(I can only test it on 12.04/Fuerte)? I could use a bit of information
from someone with a working openni driver to solve the registration
issue above.

If you want to test the driver above, you need to take the following steps:
1) The rosdeps are currently being pushed, so hand install these
packages if rosdep udpate does not catch them (libxmu-dev libxi-dev)
2) Blacklist gspac-kinect module if you have not done so already
  - Temporarily: sudo modprobe -r gspca_kinect
  - Permanently: sudo echo "blacklist gspca_kinect" >>
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Thanks!
Piyush